Traders Flip Long on Uniswap’s UNI as OKEx News Highlights CEX Risks

Uniswap’s UNI token has been closely tracking Bitcoin and the entire crypto market over the past few days and weeks, but this correlation is beginning to break as it bucks the downtrend seen by BTC over the past 24-hours and rallies higher.

One reason behind its slight upswing seen today may be the recent OKEx imbroglio, in which the founder’s arrest by the Chinese authorities effectively froze all the funds on the platform, as it cannot process withdraws without his key. This has led to 200,000 BTC being in limbo, as well as tens of millions worth of altcoins. This highlights a major point of failure for centralized exchanges, which may drive some capital towards Uniswap’s UNI token. One analyst observed that traders are now widely flipping long on UNI, with the inflows of buy-side pressure on its perpetual swap pair on Binance coming about in the minutes following the OKEx announcement last night.

Uniswap Rebounds from Recent Lows But Still Remains in a Precarious Position

At the time of writing, Uniswap is trading up just over 4% at its current price of $3.23. This is around where it has been trading throughout the past couple of days.

Overnight, however, its price dipped as low as $2.90 alongside Bitcoin and the rest of the market, with this selloff coming about directly after news regarding the OKEx situation broke. Shortly after these lows were set, the cryptocurrency saw a sharp rebound that led it to highs of $3.40. This rally seems to have come about due to investors looking towards decentralized exchange platforms like Uniswap as an alternative to centralized platforms like OKEx. Issues like the one being seen by OKEx may drive greater demand towards DEXs.

UNI Futures Traders Widely Flip Long Following OKEx Founder’s Arrest

While looking towards a comparison of OKEx’s token OKB and that of Uniswap, it is clear that traders are favoring further upside and growth for decentralized platforms following this recent hack.

Jason Choi from the Spartan Group spoke about this in , pointing to UNI’s price on Binance Futures overlaid on top of OKB’s price.

“‘Hold on a minute, DeFi solves this right?’ – thought process of the average market participant on UNI past hour,” he said.

Image Courtesy of Jason Choi. Chart via .

Depending on how this imbroglio is resolved, it may spark another adoption wave of decentralized platforms, driving significant trading volume towards Uniswap.

Featured image from Unsplash.